WW2 – What Cathy Read Next…

About the Book

Book cover of Darkness Does Not Come At Once by Glenn Bryant

Meike is seventeen and she uses a wheelchair. Already in life she’s accepted that she’ll always somehow be ‘different’. But overnight, different becomes dangerous after the government announces disabled youngsters under the age of eighteen must spend the war in specially designated institutions.

Suddenly Meike is on the run in the rural lanes she calls home, bordering Berlin. It is 1939 and the whole of Germany, it seems, wants to fight the world.

Quietly, members of Meike’s family distance themselves, but two unlikely allies stand by her. One is an elderly woman and a lifelong Catholic, forced to question her faith; the other is a fifteen-year-old boy Meike hardly knows. They begin a search for answers as they scramble to find Meike and, in a country they no longer recognise, themselves.

Format: Paperback (288 pages) Publisher: The Book Guild Ltd
Publication date: 28th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

In Darkness Does Not Come At Once the author returns to the subject he explored in his first novel, A Quiet Genocide, namely the horrific treatment of people with a disability (physical or mental) by the Nazi regime. But this time we’re experiencing this as it happens, to a young woman named Meike who uses a wheelchair following an accident.

Following the arrest of her father, Meike goes to stay with her grandparents, Marta and Hans, and makes friends with a local boy, Alfred. But her happiness is shortlived because in a dramatic change of fortune, witnessed by Alfred, but the traumatic circumstances of which we only fully discover later, Meike is sent to Hadamar. Supposedly it’s an institution designed to safeguard disabled people for the duration of the war. However, it’s anything but a sanctuary; rather it’s a place of the most depraved cruelty in which the patients are treated as less than human. When one nurse shows a degree of kindness towards the inmates, she is repriminded by Hadamar’s chief nurse. ‘Lumps of flesh, that is all. Worthless, useless idiots, all of them, serving no purpose, of no value.’

I think we’re all aware that atrocities were committed by the Nazis during World War Two against various sections of society. But the nature of these still has the ability to shock. For me that includes the ruthless efficiency with which they were carried out: paperwork completed, records kept, numbers tallied, targets set. One of the many chilling scenes in the book depicts the staff of Hadamar celebrating the successful completion of their final task.

The book explores the various responses to Meike’s situation. Initially, her grandmother’s focus is on being allowed to visit Meike, believing the propaganda that Hadamar is a place of safety. When she discovers the truth, her attitude turns to a fierce determination to rescue Meike. However, the people she approaches don’t want to help, either through fear, complicity or an unwillingness to confront reality. Her husband, Hans, fears he no longer has sufficient stomach for the fight because of what he experienced in the First World War, returning home as part of a defeated and humiliated army. And Meike’s sister, Anselma, has fallen prey to indoctrination by the Nazi regime. This gives rise to another particularly chilling scene.

The book’s title is apt because the darkness descends little by little until you can’t believe the light will ever return. But it does eventually – if only for some – because of the courage of those who refuse to give up the fight. And, l though I would have liked to learn more about the lives of the characters in the intervening years, the book’s ending made me very happy.

I wouldn’t say Darkness Does Not Come At Once is an easy read because of its subject matter but it feels important that we are reminded of the depths to which humanity can descend.

My thanks to the author for my digital review copy.

In three words: Powerful, moving, dramatic
Try something similar: When the World Was Ours by Liz Kessler

About the Author

Glenn Bryant is a former daily news journalist who today works as a senior copywriter for a financial technology company. Darkness Does Not Come at Once is his second novel, following A Quiet Genocide, published in 2018. He is a registered carer for his wife, Juliet, who has a spinal cord injury. They live happily in South Oxfordshire.

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About the Book

Book cover of A Better Place by Stephen Daisley

The old people in the district would often say that Roy was not quite the same after he come back. There was a brother. A twin brother, Tony. Tony Mitchell, different boy but a good rugby player. Bit of a mental case, they said, but Roy would have none of it. He always stayed close to Tony when they were growing up.

They both went off to fight, must have been 1940. Only the one come back, though. Crete, they thought. We lost Tony over there.

Format: ebook (224 pages) Publisher: Text Publishing
Publication date: 4th July 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

A Better Place is one of the books on the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2024. It’s a book I would probably never have come across were it not for its inclusion on the longlist. (You can find a full list of the longlisted books here.)

In the author’s hands, war is a machine that consumes human beings. ‘Screaming. Explosions. The spraying of sand and dust. Charging soldiers being shot to bits.’ The scenes on the battlefield are brutal, graphic and harrowing but they also feel absolutely authentic. And the horrors aren’t just confined to the combatants but to civilians as well. Many of the male characters’ behaviour is challenging, especially that of Roy’s comrade, Manny Jones. But there are also moments of unexpected tenderness and self-sacrifice.

Before reading this book I knew very little about the involvement of troops from New Zealand in World War 2. One of the things that struck me was the very particular bond of comradeship that existed between soldiers hailing from the same regions of New Zealand.

Roy is plagued by guilt at what he believes was his failure to save Tony despite the fact that, being brothers, they should not have been assigned to a position so near to the enemy. He’s sure that Tony would never have left him behind had the positions been reversed.

It’s difficult to say much more about how the story unfolds without giving too much away. What I can say is the reader always knows more about Tony’s fate than Roy does. This allows the author to take the reader beyond the battlefields of Crete, North Africa and Sicily to Silesia where there are experiences just as gruelling and cruel.

When Roy returns home to New Zealand’s North Island after the war he adopts a solitary existence, farming a piece of land allocated to him by the government. It’s as if he doesn’t want to engage with a world that doesn’t have Tony in it. When Roy eventually discovers what happened to Tony, it confounds his expectations in more ways than one.

A Better Place is not an easy read because of its subject matter but the writing is wonderful. It definitely deserves its place on the Walter Scott Prize longlist.

In three words: Powerful, moving, visceral
Try something similar: Patrol by Fred Majdalany

About the Author

Stephen Daisley was born in 1955 and grew up in the North Island of New Zealand. He has worked on sheep and cattle stations, on oil and gas construction sites and as a truck driver, among many other jobs.

His first novel, Traitor , won the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Coming Rain won the Ockham Prize in 2015. Stephen lives in Western Australia. (Photo/bio: Publisher author page)